Twitter changed their auth mechanism a while ago, disabling basic auth and insisting on oauth. SVN revision 353 (1.1-pre2) reflects those changes in qwit, but as a matter of fact pending packages. They are in Debian sid already – but *Ubuntu still supplies the old 303 revision (1.0)
Since Debian packages can be used on *Ubuntu too (only if they do not have too much dependencies, and qwit only demands qt4 in 1.0) I gave that a try – because without oauth support, qwit remains useless.
Problem: New dependency on libqoauth1 – which is for gods sake provided in debian sid too. Get both debs and install that package manually – qwit and Twitter working again!
$ wget http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian/pool/main/q/qoauth/libqoauth1_1.0.1-1_amd64.deb http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian/pool/main/q/qwit/qwit_1.1+svn353-1_amd64.deb $ sudo dpkg -i libqoauth1_1.0.1-1_amd64.deb qwit_1.1+svn353-1_amd64.deb